Corpus Description
What is your corpus, why did you choose it, and what do you think is interesting about it?
Synthwave (also called outrun, retrowave, or futuresynth) is an electronic music microgenre that is based predominantly on the music associated with action, science-fiction, and horror film soundtracks of the 1980s. Other influences are drawn from the decade’s art and video games. Synthwave musicians often espouse nostalgia for 1980s culture and attempt to capture the era’s atmosphere and celebrate it. (from wikipedia)
I chose this corpus because I am currently listening to a lot of synthwave music. I also listen to all my music on spotify, so I can use my playlists to build my corpus up quickly. I am also currently working on a synthwave rythm-game in unity, so exploring this corpus could also help with this side project.
What is your corpus, why did you choose it, and what do you think is interesting about it?
I intent to divide the corpus based on subgenres within synthwave. These subgenres are similar to the subgenres within heavy metal, but likely a lot more subtle. It would therefore be intresting to see if these subgenres are actually detectable within the corpus. I personally do not think there are very significant diferences between most of these subgenres, but we will see if the data agrees with that statement. As a second point of exploration, I want to distinguish between artists. This will probably fit nicely with subgenre detection, because you could imagine each artist’s style to be similar to how subgenre styles are defined.
How representative are the tracks in your corpus for the groups you want to compare?
I will use a variety of artists and playlists to build the corpus. For subgenre detection I will use playlists with songs for each subgenre. For artist dectection I will include a few albums of synthwave artists that are intresting and feel different, to make the comparison intresting.
Corpus popularity
Low popularity
Songs do not seem that popular, this is likely because Spotify gauges popularity by number of plays (recently).
Corpus speechiness
Low valence
It is not very unexpected that valence is quite low, because most of the songs in the corpus do not have vocals.
Valence
Vibe checking
Energy and Valence can convey the mood of songs. Here red are minor songs.
Dynamic Time Warping
Comparing original to remaster
This time warp compares Jan Hammer’s most iconic soundtrack ‘Crockett’s Theme’ from Miami Vice. It compares the original mix to a remastered version.
The original song
The remastered version